A developer blog focused on Adobe Flex.

BlazeDS Beta 1

I’m not sure if the announcement of BlazeDS has quite sunk in yet, but with the open sourcing of BlazeDS this really does make many Flex applications that much easier to build.

For example, I’d really like people to see the community take advantage of the Proxy Service and to contribute to its functionality going forward.

The Proxy Service is often overlooked, but did you know that it provides the following capabilities?

1. It provides better REST functionality with support for HTTP 1.1 PUT, DELETE, HEAD, TRACE, OPTIONS in addition to just GET and POST methods?

2. It provides access to non-UTF8 formatted text as the Proxy should be able to read in many more character set encodings – because it is Java based the stream will be converted into UCS-2 internally and then the Proxy will always format this data back to the Flash Player as UTF-8?

3. It allows 3rd party URLs to be aliased so that they do not have to be hard coded or exposed in your application (and Proxy destinations can also be locked down so that only authorized users can tunnel though to a 3rd party destination).

4. It provides a way to get back the response data even when the HTTP status code is not 200?

5. It provides a way to login to a 3rd party endpoint that issues a Basic Authentication challenge without exposing the pop-up to the end user (that is, you can build a custom Flex UI as a login form and set the remote credentials for the proxy to use in pre-authenticating to a 3rd party endpoint).

Also, there’s more that could be done here. Features that I’d like to see in the future:

A. Restoring the ability to stream back binary data instead of just text data.